You're On My Mind, Like a Song on the Radio
by Vermin Disciple
Summary: 1979. Young Sam has an unsettling encounter. Gen


Sam's enjoyment of his birthday present was somewhat hampered, both by his broken arm and his mother's concern.

Despite his mum's protests to the contrary, he was quite sure he could ride one-handed. It was only his left arm that was down for the count, and no amount of caution in the world was going to keep him off the first new bicycle he'd ever owned.

"Oh leave off, Ruth," his Auntie Heather had said. "It'll learn him good if he breaks the other one." She winked at him as he passed. Her name wasn't on the card, but he strongly suspected that she'd chipped in her part for it, and he'd never felt more justified in calling her his favorite aunt.

He couldn't see either of them now, and he didn't want to risk turning his head. He _could_ ride one-handed, but he wasn't all that adept at steering yet. His mind was consumed with one thought: _faster. _Yes, faster. That would've been better, that would be _freeing_, but he wasn't about to get laid up with another broken bone, whatever his aunt said.

Sam leaned his cast against the handle bar and peddled harder, tuning out everything but the sound of the wind in his ears, turning corners and dodging rubbish in narrow alleys. Though he wasn't paying a great deal of attention to where he was going, he navigated his way with the ease of any creature with intimate knowledge of its territory, navigating by instinct rather than any of the less refined senses. He wasn't at all surprised, therefore, when he found himself gliding between the two abandoned cars that marked the entrance to the Wasteland.

The Wasteland was a vacant patch of ground, home to well-packed-in rubbish and decades of debris – an ever shifting obstacle course.

At first, Sam thought it was deserted. That was a relief, because he didn't fancy a show-down with the older boys who sometimes frequented the Wasteland; not _today_, not when it was _his_ day. He was ten years old today, and he already had a broken arm (Bobby Morris, on the playground, one good shove off the monkey bars) – nothing else was going to spoil it.

Except that he wasn't alone.

There was a man. He was just sort of standing there, watching him with – fascination, or something. It was rather worrying. Then he began to walk towards him. Sam considered making a break for it, but the man had seen him and was coming over to have a word, so Sam waited and braced himself for a telling off.

The stranger opened his mouth to speak – and then stopped. He swallowed and started again, his voice soft, "Hello, Sam."

The man was a few paces away now. Sam was seized with a sudden urge to bolt, though he wasn't sure _why_. The man didn't seem threatening. And curiosity got the better of him. "How do you know my name?"

"It's okay, I… I know your mum," he said, rather hesitantly. "And," he added, with a slight smile. "I'm a police officer."

The man did look a bit familiar, come to think of it. Sam generally tried to avoid his mum's friends, who mostly wanted to poke and prod and mollycoddle him, and tell him what a poor little dear he was. This man didn't look like the poking and prodding sort. In fact, he was avoiding looking directly at Sam's face, and he kept himself a step further away than seemed natural. Sam was going to be a detective some day, so he noticed these things. And the man's last statement definitely grabbed his interest.

He crossed his arms, narrowing his eyes and trying to hide his excitement. "Can I see your warrant card?"

"Of course." The man chuckled, meeting Sam's eyes for the first time. Sam nearly stepped back in shock as a startling chill ran through him. He wondered if the stranger felt it too, because he immediately averted his gaze, staring instead at Sam's trainers as he reached for his badge.

"Brilliant!" said Sam, forgetting his attempt to stay cool. Without thinking, he reached out an eager hand to touch it, and was immediately seized by a wave of vertigo that tied his stomach in knots. He quickly retracted his hand and swallowed, trying to recover from the point of contact. He was about to ask the man to move his thumb, so Sam could see his name and rank – if only to distract from his brief, embarrassing turn – when he heard someone calling his name.

"Sam!" A woman was striding toward them, with short brown hair and a determined expression. She sounded rather like his Year 3 teacher Ms. Bradshaw, who seemed like the nicest woman in the school until she caught you doing something "untoward," as she called it, and then even old Mr. Hickson, with his sneering sarcasm and his convulsively twitching eye, was preferable opposition.

But Sam was quite sure he had no idea who _this_ woman was, nor how she knew his name. He nearly blurted this out before he realized that the woman wasn't addressing him at all, she was looking at the policeman, still standing with his warrant card flipped open in his outstretched hand. He withdrew it hastily, and faced the woman with an expression Sam was sure he'd tried on Ms. Bradshaw before.

She stopped, looking between them, briefly examining Sam with raised eyebrows, before turning to speak to the man beside him.

"Oh, Sam…" Disappointment. Resignation. It was the same tone his mother had used when he'd been sent home with a black eye, a split lip, and a note saying that Jimmy Tipton had been sent home with a broken nose. (Jimmy was a year older and weighed a stone and a half more than he did, so Sam had been feeling pretty decent about the whole thing until he saw the expression on his mother's face.) He felt a twinge of sympathy for this other Sam.

The other Sam, however, merely soldiered on as if he hadn't noticed the woman's tone. "Sam, this is my friend, Annie. Annie, this is Sam Tyler. It's his birthday." His gaze on the woman, Annie, was almost severe in its intensity; he didn't look at Sam at all when he introduced him.

It was working, too. Annie seemed uncomfortable. (Sam made a mental note to try that technique next time his mum gave him a hard time about the fighting – it wasn't as though that was _his_ fault, exactly.) She broke eye-contact with the other Sam and spoke to him instead. "Oh, is that-- is that right?" He nodded. "Well, happy birthday, Sam. I hope you've had a nice day, lots of lovely gifts, yes?" she added. Unlike Ms. Bradshaw, Annie was clearly not at home around children.

"He got the bike. It's an excellent bike," said the other Sam, sounding wistful.

"Er, yeah. It is," said Sam

"It's very nice," said Annie.

In the awkward silence that followed, Sam wished, suddenly, _desperately_, that they would both go away and leave him alone, _now_. There was something wrong with the way they kept looking at him, both of them. A fresh wave of nausea hit him as he turned to the other Sam again, and he couldn't help but notice that the other Sam looked very peaky himself, like he was fighting the urge to heave up. They both closed their eyes, and swallowed, breathing hard.

"_Sam_," said Annie, worry creeping into her voice like a cat burglar in the night. "Don't you think we should be getting along, now? The Guv wants you back at the station, and I won't repeat what he said he'd do to you if you don't show yourself soon."

Sam would have like to know, but he doubted that she'd tell him if he asked. Grown-ups were funny about that sort of thing.

"Yeah, I suppose you're right, I'll just…" The other Sam trailed off, and began searching his pockets.

"It was very nice to meet you, Sam," said Annie, addressing him this time. She shook his hand. A flash of red leapt across his brain – a red dress, a woman running, something he had to do, someone he had to find – but the thought was gone before he could make heads or tails of it.

"I've got something for you," said the other Sam. "For your birthday. So, er, happy birthday."

He handed Sam a small package, neatly wrapped in blue paper. "Thank you, sir."

They left, rounding the corner of the old rotting fence that framed the Wasteland. Sam waited a moment, and then quietly walked his bike over to a spot of the fence where he could still hear their voices. Creeping along beside and slightly behind, he listened. It was wrong to eavesdrop, his mum said, but all his budding copper instincts were screaming at him that something was amiss here. Besides, he was curious.

"What?" the other Sam was saying. "He's going through a bit of a rough patch, that's all. I just thought I'd…"

"You don't know that, Sam. You don't know him at all. You saw him once when he was four – it was just the once, wasn't it?"

"I've not been stalking them, if that's what you think!"

Annie sighed. "You've been acting so strangely, Sam. Not as strange as… well, you know. _Before_. But you've been… distant. Off." A pause. "Don't look at me like that. I'm _worried_ about you, that's all."

"It's almost over," said Sam, in a small voice, as if talking to himself. "It's almost the new year…"

"That's months away. Is that was this is all about? That the 70s are almost over?" She sounded even more exasperated. "Because time was, you couldn't _wait—_"

"_Don't._" She was so taken aback by his tone that she stopped walking. Sam could imagine her staring at him, wide-eyed, torn between worry and anger and fear. "I'm sorry, Annie. I just… just, don't, alright. Let's not dredge up all that now. Water under the bridge." His voice was brittle.

They were moving again, and Sam was nearing the back corner of the Wasteland, a bastion of abandoned beer bottles, perfumed with the aroma of piss. It was also the end of the line, because Annie and the other Sam continued straight and across the street, out of his hearing.

Whatever he had just heard had not satisfied his curiosity in the slightest. He could ask his mother about them, he supposed, but his stomach flipped over at the idea of ever mentioning the other Sam to anybody. The intense aversion he felt to ever seeing the man again was overwhelming and bizarre and completely _mental_, but he felt it in his gut, like the instinct of a rabbit to avoid a fox. It was giving him the creeps.

The package was digging its corners into his hand, which was squeezing it too tightly, seemingly of its own accord. He almost tossed it in amongst the empty Party Sevens, not wanting a souvenir of the encounter.

But he couldn't. His hand refused to release its ironclad grip on the small blue box. So, Sam backed his bike away from the fence and its malodorous stains, and found a seat on an ancient tire. His fingers shook as he picked at the Sellotape sealing the edges of the plain blue paper. There was no card; there was no label of any kind. The paper concealed nothing more than a small brown box. He closed his eyes, and opened it.

He blinked. Well, _that_ was anticlimactic.

A tape lay against the cardboard, like a man asleep on a bare mattress. He balanced the box against his cast, resting it on the handlebars, and picked up the tape with his good hand. Names were written in neat, precise handwriting on the back, indicating the contents. Some were familiar, (David Bowie was there, who his mum disapproved of, and there was Gary Numan, who his eyes always lingered over in the record store). Some were not (who on earth was Marc Bolan?). As he moved to put the tape back down, he noticed that the blank white paper he'd assumed was part of the box, was in fact a crisply folded note.

It was a note folded over several pound notes. _Enough for an LP of your own choosing, _it said. And it was.

Sam pocketed the lot.

It had been a strange day. It would undoubtedly warrant much contemplation. But not right now. Right now, he wasn't going to look a gift-horse in the mouth.

It was his birthday today, and a stranger had left him with a headache, a bit of vertigo, and enough money for a single LP.

What he wanted right now was the wind in his ears; preferably on the way to his favorite record store.

_Finis_


End file.
